Healthy Comprehensive Planning

Page Content

​Comprehensive planning is one opportunity to link the traditional notions of planning (land use, transportation, community facilities, housing, and parks and open space) with health themes (physical activity, healthy eating, and health equity).

Comprehensive plans can help link policy decisions about the built environment with long-term health impacts. With the leadership of Dakota County Public Health staff, these Healthy Comprehensive Plan documents were developed and shared with city and county planners around the state, and used by some to create their own versions to share with local partners.

These documents were also used by local food shelves to encourage cities to address food access in their planning. The Healthy Comprehensive Planning Checklist was developed in collaboration with the Metro Healthy Comprehensive Plan Work Group, as a tool to guide and evaluate comprehensive plans on health-supporting policies. These documents were shared at the 2017 National Walking Summit in St. Paul and the Minnesota American Planning Association annual conference.